For science agencies, access to federally funded research is a key part of our mission. And the very first requirement for federal agency public access plans directed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was that the plans must encompass “a strategy for leveraging existing archives, where appropriate, and fostering public-private partnerships with scientific journals relevant to the agency’s research [emphasis added].” This 2013 OSTP memo is replete with calls for public-private partnerships. When it comes to the key issue of repositories, for example, agencies are told that “[r]epositories could be maintained by the Federal agency funding the research, through an arrangement with other Federal agencies, or through other parties working in partnership with the agency including, but not limited to, scholarly and professional associations, publishers, and libraries [emphasis added].” Under the section on “Objectives for Public Access to Scientific Publications,” the OSTP memo states that agency plans “shall …[e]ncourage public-private collaboration to: maximize the potential for interoperability between public and private platforms and creative reuse to enhance value to all stakeholders, avoid unnecessary duplication of existing mechanisms, maximize the impact of the Federal research investment, and otherwise assist with implementation of the agency plan [emphasis added].” And public-private partnerships are also called out in the memo’s section on data management plans.

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), a unit of the Office of Science, recently completed a restructuring to fulfill agency-wide responsibilities to collect, preserve, and disseminate scientific and technical information (STI) emanating from DOE research and development (R&D) activities, including a new obligation to provide public access to DOE-affiliated journal articles.

As Spring 2015 rolls around, it’s time to mark a momentous occasion in the history of SciTech Connect: it’s turning TWO!

SciTech Connect is a publicly available database of bibliographic citations for energy-related scientific and technical information (STI), including technical reports, journal articles, conference papers, books, multimedia, and data information. Launched in March 2013 by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), SciTech Connect incorporated the contents of two of the most popular core DOE collections, DOE Information Bridge and Energy Citations Database, and employed an innovative semantic search tool and updated interface to enable scientists, researchers, and the public to retrieve more relevant information. SciTech Connect has emerged as a go-to resource, becoming OSTI’s most-visited repository for DOE science, technology, and engineering research information. Currently, it offers users over 2.7 million citations, including 400,000 full-text documents and nearly 1.5 million journal article citations, 240,000 of which have digital object identifiers (DOIs) with links to publishers’ websites.

Forty-five years ago, nations around the world saw their dream for a more efficient way to share nuclear-related information reach fruition through the creation of a formal international collaboration. This was accomplished without the internet, email, or websites. It was the right thing to do for public safety, education, and the further advancement of science. It was also a necessary way forward as the volume of research and information about nuclear-related science, even back then, was skyrocketing and exceeded the capacity for any one country to go it alone. And the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) was part of the collaboration from its initial planning stages.

The International Nuclear Information System, or INIS, as it is commonly known, was approved by the Governing Board of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1969 and began operations in 1970. The primary purpose of INIS was, and still is, to collect and share information about the peaceful uses of nuclear science and technology, with participating nations sharing efforts to build a centralized resource.

Sometimes the ordinary things we use every day can lead to extraordinary discoveries. This was truly the case when physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov used the humble adhesive tape to extract single layers of graphene from graphite.

Although graphene had been theorized years before, it was thought to be impossible to isolate such thin crystalline materials in a laboratory. Geim and Novoselov not only exfoliated their thin sheets of graphene, they transferred them to a silicon substrate, the standard working material in the semiconductor industry and did electrical characterization on the graphite layers.